In the previous episode Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Snake and the SongbirdTom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Jason Schwartzman, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis bring the youth of Coriolanus Snow to life.
With the $2.96 billion grossed by the cinematic quadrilogy, the studios and director Francis Lawrence are doing it again. This time it is the prequel episode “The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird,” written by Suzanne Collins and released in 2020, which serves as the starting point for the film.
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Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird.
The action takes place 64 years before the events of the first Hunger Games feature film. Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), 18, becomes the mentor of Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), District 12’s homage to these 10th Hunger Games. Young Snow only dreams of going to university, and to do that Lucy Gray has to win the Hunger Games.
A real world…
The feature film was shot last year in Poland and Berlin and immerses fans in the post-war Capitol. “Berlin immediately stood out because of its architectural elements,” filmmaker Francis Lawrence said during a press conference in the German city earlier this month. “We also shot some scenes from the original saga here,” he remembers.
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Viola Davis in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird.
The sets of the Capitol, the Hunger Games arena, and even the apartment of the Snows, a family impoverished during the war, are impressive.
“We didn’t use green screens much,” said Uli Hanisch, production designer for “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird.” “Francis and I decided from the beginning to use real locations because the universe is so grounded in reality. We found the perfect venue for the arena in Poland. The only place we built from scratch on a film set was the Snow Apartment because we wanted to give it a very special look and shape. Apparently the buildings and some other visual details like giant statues were then added by the special effects department.
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Peter Dinklage in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird.
“I had taken it for granted,” adds Tom Blyth, “that I would be shooting mostly in front of green screens and that it would be a very technical shoot.” But the sets that Uli created were so real that it felt , as if we were in the Capitol!”
It is a coincidence that Tom Blyth was chosen for the role of the young Coriolanus Snow, a role played by Donald Sutherland in the previous saga, as described by Francis Lawrence.
“I called Rachel right at the start of the project, she was my first choice for the role of Lucy Gray. We met and while such a meeting normally lasts an hour, we spent four hours discussing the book, the characters and the songs. And there were even tears.”
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Fionnula Flanagan, Tom Blyth and Hunter Schafer in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird.
“Tom, that’s a completely different story. We auditioned tons of actors and it really came out of the blue. I was sitting on the train when I saw the video of his audition. He has big blue eyes reminiscent of Donald Sutherland and I could see a similarity between the two. Tom is an excellent actor who did Julliard [une école d’art dramatique extrêmement prestigieuse, NDLR] and we knew he would perfectly capture the character’s emotional journey.”
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird hits theaters November 17th.